POV: yumi
Summary
Yumi stacks. Dozens of stones, then hundreds — moving without thought yet with Intent, building towering formations around herself from the bones of a broken city. Sculptures of fifty stones, sixty; she has to climb up on the nearby chunks of rubble to finish the tallest. She lays out a spiralling design from her towers, stacks like seeds blown from a spinning flower, the smallest piece fitting the next. Stone flows as though it were water. Time loses meaning to her. This is her meditation. This is her purpose. This is creation. *And it is art*, the narrator says — something the machine, however technically capable, could never understand. Art has always been about what it does to those who make and witness it. On this one transcendent day Yumi is both. Artist and audience. Alone.
Until the spirits join her. Spirits flow out of the machine's precise stacking and through her stones — a dozen, two dozen, a hundred, hundreds — drawn from the technical marvel they had been bound to by something they recognise as *meaningful*. The machine panics; the next stack topples; she uses its stones to make something better. Each spirit ripped away is one less drop of fuel.
Somewhere in the middle of it Yumi realises what she is doing. No machine means no shroud. No shroud means no more souls in bondage — and no more her. The fourteen yoki-hijo only stayed alive after their initial death because the machine held the shroud in place around them. When the shroud goes, she goes with it.
She does not stop. This time it is not omens, not what she was *born to do*, but a thing she decides for herself: service to her people, to the spirits, and last of all to someone she loves. As she places the final stone, the last spirit is pried from the machine's grip. She looks east toward someone she can feel out there. Someone frightened. For her. Behind her the machine at last falls still, slumps, and the parts of it that were never real evaporate away. The spirits thank her. She closes her eyes. It is finished.
Outside Kilahito, the police and EMTs have arrived. The wounded painters are being bandaged; reporters are taking incredulous statements; nurses hand out blankets to the hundred strange villagers who speak a language modern ears cannot quite follow without the Connection Yumi and Painter share. Then the Torish people start to fade — and Painter thinks for a moment that the nightmares are coming back. They are not. The people are simply going, each one smiling. Liyun meets his eyes and grins, then turns her face to the sky. The shroud is undulating differently now. Hissing. Unravelling.
*Yumi?* he thinks. *What is going on?* *I've done it…* she sends back. *How?* *Yes.* *I'm coming to you* — he is already running toward the dissolving shroud — *where are you?* The answer is only regret. *Nikaro, do you remember what you said about sad stories?* He drops to his knees in the street.
Out west, Yumi feels her arms become smoke; her dress melds with the streaming pieces of her; for one brief moment she feels the gratitude of the other thirteen yoki-hijo — finally released from service — and then the thanks of the thousands upon thousands of souls that had made up the shroud, now free at last. *Why must it be sad?* he sends. *Because this is what I have to do.* She cannot remember her own face any longer. From the smoke come the old lies drilled into her seventeen centuries ago: *I was created to serve. My life is not my own.* He pushes back. *It doesn't have to be that way. Your life can belong to you. It should.* Around her the spirits exult; the contrast is unbearable. *I'm losing myself. No one knows me anymore. I don't even know myself. It was always a dream. Such a wonderful dream. Perhaps the first such ever given by a nightmare.*
*Yumi*, he sends, *I love you.* A good emotion at last.
*I love you, Painter*, she thinks back. *Please. Remember me.*
And the last yoki-hijo — the one chosen as a baby, designated to give her life — does exactly that. Evaporates into nothing.